Saraid de Silva is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Her debut novel, Amma, was published in Australia and New Zealand by Moa Press, part of Hachette Aotearoa, and in the UK by Weatherglass Books in 2024. In 2023 she was selected for Art Omi’s international writers residency in Columbia County, New York, and in 2025 she will be the New Zealand writer-in-residence at Randell Cottage in Wellington. Amma was long listed for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction, part of the New Zealand book awards, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2025.
Simukai Chigudu is associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and fellow of St. Antony’s College. Originally from Zimbabwe, he moved to the UK to complete his secondary and university education. He has an eclectic professional and academic background, having studied African history and politics, public health and medicine. Before coming into academia, he worked in the NHS for three years. He is also one of the founding members of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, and has become a leading voice in public debates on the cultural politics of colonialism and racism.
His academic monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award. He is now writing his first trade book Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire, which will be published by The Bodley Head in the UK and Crown in the US. It combines memoir, political history and cultural criticism to show how colonialism continues to shape politics, society and culture in Africa and in Britain and to explore what it really means to decolonise.
Dr. Lexi Stadlen is a writer, anthropologist and ethnographer. With a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, she spent two and a half years living in India, conducting research on the intimate lives of women. In 2019 she won the Bayly prize, awarded by the Royal Asiatic Society for an outstanding thesis on an Asian topic completed at a British university in the preceding year.
Her first book, Nine Paths, a narrative nonfiction account of the stories of nine women in an Indian village, was published by Chatto & Windus in April 2022. She is now based in Dubai with her husband and son.
Amber Husain is a writer based in South London, UK. She is the author of Meat Love (Mack, 2023) and Replace Me (Peninsula Press, 2021). Her essays on politics, literature and art have been published in Granta, the LRB, New Left Review, The White Review, Baffler, The Believer, LA Review of Books and New York Times Magazine.
She is currently completing a PhD at UCL on art and mind-body medicine in early neoliberal Britain, and she teaches history of art, creative writing and criticism. She has previously worked as a university research fellow, as a book editor, and as a magazine co-editor.
Her third non-fiction book, Tell Me How You Eat, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann (UK) and Atria Books (USA).
James Wythe is a food blogger and heath coach who taught himself to cook when he became seriously ill with M.E. and ended up being bed bound for two years. His recipes are simple, accessible and cater to all sorts of different health needs.
His first recipe book, Healthy Living James, sold to Headline at auction and was published in March 2022. Jam-packed with 80 easy, healthy recipes, this cookbook is for anyone who is suffering ill health, has food allergies, is totally new to cooking, or simply lacks time.
Each recipe is: gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, mainly plant-based (but it’s easy to add meat or fish), simple to follow, affordable and easy to adapt with ingredient swaps. With ideas for breakfast and brunch, on-the-go lunches, batch cooking, store cupboard meals and week-night dinners, there will be something for everyone.
Simon Lancaster is one of the world’s top speechwriters. He first started writing speeches for Cabinet Ministers in Tony Blair’s Government in the late 1990s and he’s since gone on to write speeches for some of the biggest business leaders in the world, including the CEOs of Unilever, InterContinental Hotels and HSBC.
He has written three best-selling books on communication including Speechwriting: The Expert Guide(Hale, 2010), Winning Minds: Secrets from the Language of Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and You Are Not Human: How Words Kill (Biteback, 2018). He lectures at Cambridge University, is an Executive Fellow of Henley Business School and his 2016 Speak Like A Leader TEDx talk has received almost 4 million views.
His latest book, Connect, was published by Heligo Press in 2022 and explains that the secret of brilliant communication is all down to making connections.
K Patrick is a writer based in Scotland. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Review, Grantaand Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021, the same year that K was also shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize. In 2023 they were shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.
Their debut novel, Mrs S, published by Fourth Estate (UK) and Europa (US) was selected as an ObserverBest Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Their debut poetry collection, Three Births, was published by Granta Poetry. It was longlisted for the 2024 Laurel Prize and shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards. Their piece ‘Walk’ was selected for the Forward Book of Poetry 2025.
Arthur der Weduwen is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project. He is an expert on the history of the Netherlands and also writes more broadly on the history of publishing, news, libraries and politics. He is the author of five books, most recently The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019) and The Library: A Fragile History (Profile / Basic Books, 2021), both co-written with Andrew Pettegree. Commended by the judges as “wonderfully absorbing and wide-ranging”, The Librarywas longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2022.
Fernando Cervantes is Reader in History at the University of Bristol, and has a special interest in the intellectual and religious history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. His previous works include The Devil in the New World, Spiritual Encounters and Angels, Demons and the New World.
Dr Cervantes was the John Coffin Memorial Lecturer in the History of Ideas at the University of London in 2005 and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, and the Liguria Study Centre for the Arts and the Humanities, Bogliasco, Italy.
His new book, Conquistadores: A New History, was published by Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK in 2020 and by Viking in the US in September 2021. It was named a Book Of The Year 2020 by The Sunday Times,Times Literary Supplement, The Tablet and The Lady. “Enlightening … Conquistadores makes for fascinating reading” — Jude Webber, Financial Times.
Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee, Room, The Kyoto Journal and Cicada, among others. Her short story, ‘A Girl Named Indigo’, was translated and published in Japanese as a picture book with the titleIndigo wo sagashite (Shogakukan, 2020). She was a recipient of a We Need Diverse Books Mentorship (with Nicola Yoon) and a finalist for the 2020 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award.
Her debut YA novel, Catfish Rolling (Zephyr, 2023), blends magical realism with Japanese myth in an original story about grief and memory. US rights have been sold to Abrams Children’s and Canadian rights to Penguin Teen Canada.
Clara is also developing an essay collection centred around multiracial identity, hybridity and belonging. She lives in Ireland.
